Here's how group messaging app Palringo raised $230,000 for Syria and Gaza this Ramadan

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Palringo, a
London-headquartered group messaging and gaming app for iOS and
Android launched in 2006, used its 27 million-strong user network
to raise $230,000 USD for charity this Ramadan. Palringo users gave
$125,019 USD to Islamic
Relief, and $111,039 to Child’s Play, bringing the
total to $236,095. The money will be used primarily to support
relief efforts in Syria and Gaza.

Around 65% of Palringo’s users live in the Arab region, confirms
Norah Ferriss, the company’s marketing and PR lead, in an email to
Wamda. “We wanted to engage with them [specially] around the
Ramadan period…. We thought we could use our platform and our
engaged audience to help raise much needed funds for the two chosen
charities.”

Ferriss states that a similar campaign last year showed the team
that “our users based in the region felt a strong connection with
Islamic Relief and the work they do.” The team added Child’s Play
as an option this year so as to appeal to “our non-Islamic users,
encouraging charitable giving across the entire user base,” among
other reasons. The strategy appears to have worked: whereas last
year,
only 2% of donations came from outside the region, this year
the figure is closer to 10%, Ferriss says. “Both charities are also
of personal importance to our employees,” she says.

Users were able to donate through
so-called charity bots that users could download in their chat
groups (bots are pieces of added functionality that users add to
their groups, such as games, moderators, organizational tools,
etc.). Once the bots were released in the in-app store, the team
didn’t need to do much marketing to get the word out: “we released
them with a simple notification… and our users kickstarted the buzz
about the campaign themselves…. Before we knew it more than 7,000
groups [out of the total 350,000] had added a Charity Bot and we
had raised over $15,000 in the first day alone,” Ferriss says.

“Individual donations generally ranged from $1 to $3,000 USD,
with an average donation of $15.”

“Looking at the Gulf region, we saw a change in the nature of
engagement during Ramadan last year, discussion topics related to
religion and charity,” Palringo CEO Tim Rea
told The National after last year’s campaign. “For us it was
interesting to experiment with the idea of encouraging charitable
giving within a social context.”